Harry Redknapp: why the days of such hoary-handed managers are numberedDefeat by Manchester United is likely to signal the end for Queens Park Rangers’ classic British football man
The age of Redknappism has passed, and well played to him for lingering so long.
Three years ago almost to the day I was in the Swansea City press room watching André Villas-Boas answer questions on TV about his ailing Chelsea team, speaking as ever in fluent Villas-Boas. The collective is strong. The energy in the group is good. The dream of a vision of a goal of a very special tomorrow is very much on track. It was still very easy to marvel at Villas-Boas’s fluency in a language not his own, even as the suspicion began to settle that this was a man fluent in the international language of techno-gabble, popping up in front of the cameras each week like a sad, handsome android doggedly translating into English a 600,000-word EU pamphlet on integrated agricultural systems.
“AVB, there he is!” a passer-by shouted as Villas-Boas waded on – a passer-by who turned out on closer inspection to be Harry Redknapp, in town with Spurs to play Swansea that afternoon. “Tell you what, I’m going to change my name to HJR,” Redknapp announced on his way out. “It makes me sound more h'in-tell-i-gent.”
Looking back it isn’t hard to see why Redknapp was feeling peppy. Early 2012 was in many ways a career high-water mark, the last knockings of what we might call Peak Harry. Memories were still fresh of playing Real Madrid in the last 16 of the Champions League. Tottenham were third in the Premier League on New Year’s Day. Redknapp was passing his days in the company of Gareth Bale and Luka Modric.
And yet it turns out this was pretty much as good as it got. The following month, Fabio Capello left the England job and despite fanfaring his credentials Redknapp was not in the frame. Five months on he was sacked by Spurs. Two weeks after that Villas-Boas had his job. Perhaps he really should have changed his name to HJR after all.
This week there have been ominous reports that Redknapp might lose his job if Queens Park Rangers fail to beat Manchester United on Saturday, a departure that could turn out to be his last. It isn’t fashionable to admit to being a Redknapp fan, at least not in these pages where confessing a mild admiration for the oldest manager currently working in English football and the last English manager to win a major trophy (the FA Cup with Portsmouth in 2008) is likely to result in charges of sycophancy, favours for favours, tactical idiocy, happy birthday singing, and various other crimes of hackery.
Which is a bit of shame, and not only because Redknapp’s managerial achievements across three divisions and four decades are far too easily dismissed. Not that many will mourn him. Much of the broader condescension towards Redknapp is based on the idea that he is a symptom of something best forgotten, a culture of rickety wheeler-dealing, of good old English sporting anti-intellectualism, hostility to the more academic world of systems and pure coaching, the manager who can’t write a sentence, fears the influence of too much “h’intelligence” and trusts instead in experience, gut judgments, and hoary-handed knowhow.
There is even a suggestion Redknapp is a slightly dangerous influence, that appointing him manager of your aspirational, mid-budget team is a bit like inviting the Pogues round for Christmas: fun, boisterous but destined to leave you waking up face-down in a bowl of custard with the kitchen on fire, a Yule log crammed into the front of the Blu-ray player and a vague sense of something briefly but ruinously exciting having taken place.
And yet in a sense Redknapp is a victim of changing roles, an acme of the classic British football man – dealmaker, PR man, figurehead – at a time when these broader, vaudevillian gifts have a greatly reduced currency. Redknapp comes from less orderly times, when routes into management were circuitous, you had to weave and splurge, and sharp practice and sharp elbows were the norm.
Football has simply moved on, the manager’s job refined and reduced into something more specific and tactical. Like it or not, the AVB type – if not perhaps AVB himself – is the template, the manager who sees the game as an object of study and analysis, a human science as opposed to a coup de théâtre run on gut feeling, spin and entrepreneurial vim.
If the requirements of the role are more condensed, this is hardly a flattering fit for a manager often dismissed as a blunt, one-track tactician, whose attacking plan this season, based around the adhesive qualities of Bobby Zamora’s chest, gives a fairly clear indication of why Rangers can’t win away from home and why Redknapp is apparently on the verge of another departure.
For all that he has still given us some brilliantly memorable teams down the years, from Spurs in San Siro to the thrillingly creative Portsmouth promotion team built around Paul Merson, revived for one last glorious hurrah like a drop-handle racing bike pulled out of a skip and gummed together in the shed with string and duct tape.
Whether there will be any more, with Redknapp aged 67 and heading towards another career interruption, is open to question. What is worth noting is that English football has produced little to fill the void. We may no longer want this, but what are we offering in return? The English managers that remain in the Premier League are adaptable dinosaurs – as with the reupholstered Big Sam – or passing hopefuls. Where are our next-gen technocrats, our José Mourinhos or Arsène Wengers? Redknapp is the only Englishman to manage an English club in the Champions League in the past decade, and one of only four alongside Bobby Robson, Ray Harford and Howard Wilkinson. The next in line, whoever that may be, looks a long way off.
Not that there should be any real regrets here. The age of Redknappism has passed, and well played to him for lingering so long. For all the standard snark, it is hard to think of another figure whose removal from the front rank of English football will leave such a tangible absence, a sense of a distinctive indigenous flavour now, for better or worse, on its way out.
Guardian
